Fletcher Family

The Fletcher Family collection includes family correspondence from the period 1826-1903 and photographs from circa 1860-1890. The material comes from the Fletcher Family subseries of the Consuelo Northrop Bailey Papers, which contains family papers collected by Consuelo's mother, Katherine Fletcher Northrop.

The correspondence included in this collection was collected by Ruth Allen Colton Fletcher, Henrietta Smith Fletcher, and Katherine Fletcher. Ruth was born in 1810 or 1811 to Lydia and Lemuel Colton of Sharon, VT. She married Andrew Fletcher in 1839, and lived in Waterville, Belvidere, and then Johnson, VT until her death, circa 1903. Her oldest surviving child was Andrew Craig Fletcher, who married Henrietta Smith in 1869. Henrietta was born in 1845 to Catherine and George Smith of Burke, NY. Katherine Fletcher was born in 1870 to Henrietta and Andrew Craig Fletcher of Jeffersonville, VT. She attended Johnson State Normal School from 1885-1887, graduating in January 1888.

The correspondence describes the experiences of several family members who moved west to New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and California. The correspondents recount in great detail the work of creating and managing their farms in these new states or territories, and many letters give meticulous lists of the prices of land, grains, stock, and groceries. The families in this correspondence endure a great deal of sickness and deaths and these as well as some accounts of their medical treatments are described in the letters. There are a few letters from Enos Fletcher and Charles Hogan that are from the Civil War, and several letters refer to the War and its effects on their communities. There is an account of the "St. Albans Raid" by Ruth's son Andrew Craig Fletcher, who was working in St. Albans at the time. Katherine Fletcher's correspondence with her family and classmates document her life and studies at Vermont's teacher training institution twenty years into its history as such.

Below is a list of most of the correspondents and their basic biographical information if known. Some of the dates are those found in Katherine Fletcher's geneaological research and some have been inferred from the correspondence. The list is alphabetized by first name.